Horror in the Vast Rooms of the Internet

I keep a piece of tape over my webcam. If you asked me why, I would probably say something vague about men, hackers, how my webcam looks like a robot eye. I would point you to some articles that have sparked fear in me over the last few years. I keep a piece of tape over my webcam mostly because I am a woman, which means that there are eyes out there that like to watch. Which means that my body, when translated to video, can make a stranger money, or fulfill his warped desires. But I also feel like there’s something inside my computer that is larger than what I hold in my hands. Some vast world, deep web, full of talented people with grim intentions, full of programming I do not have the tools to understand, full of a darkness that crackles when I am asleep.

Once, a friend called me, certain that someone was digitally stalking her, that every blink in her old monitor, every failed attempt to get into her email or Facebook, was at the hands of a man who sat in front of his computer, guiding her somewhere—into his trap. Later, I found out that this level of hacking was likely not possible by an individual, but it seems significant that we both thought that it was.

If the internet is a series of rooms, then it has been around long enough to create at least a few ghosts. There are discarded chatrooms and Myspace pages, forums about everything from exotic pets to cancer survival that haven’t been posted in since 2011. There are Facebook and Instagram and Twitter profiles that belong to the dead, only coming back to life when a family member or friend logs on to say things like “I miss you,” and “I wish you were still here.” There’s revenge porn that can take thousands of dollars in lawyers to remove, and even then may stay online, impossible to scrub. There are the messages from abusive exes that can never be deleted, in case, one day, you’ll have to prove you were abused. We die differently now that we have each other at the tip of our fingertips. We live differently, too.

It’s only natural that horror movies would soon arrive in the vast rooms of social media and the internet. I spent one weekend googling “social media horror movie” and watching as many as I could find; Unfriended, Unfriended: Dark Web, Friend Request, Cam. I thought I would be able to relate to social media horror, familiar as I was with strange, creepy direct messages, Twitter profiles emerging to send spam, or dick pics, then vanishing when I tried to report them.

I watch horror to articulate thoughts that exist in me only as vague, unshapen terrors. Horror shows me the ghosts, yes, but also the monsters who have phone numbers and bank accounts and grocery lists and friends, who are afraid of roller coasters or snakes or spiders. Yes, I remember, when watching It Follows—it makes sense that sometimes I am afraid of sex. Yes, I thought while watching Raw, there is danger even inside my own body.

Recently, despite being very “plugged in,” I felt an unease flicker inside me when I retweeted, or posted on Instagram stories, or even connected to an old elementary bully on Linkedin (the glue in hair kind, nothing worse). I wanted to name that unease to find solace in the fact that others are also afraid.

What a disappointment it was, after all, to see that these horror movies did not see women as their heroines, but as their villains. In Unfriended, a group of suburban teenagers are haunted (over Skype), by a girl who died by suicide after they cyberbullied her. She sends them a friend request, chats with them, forces them to play games, to stay online as their friends die in front of them. Friend Request follows a similar template. A witch becomes obsessed with one of her college classmates, then dies by suicide when the classmate rejects her. Using spellcraft, she creates a ghost out of herself, and haunts each of her target’s friends, eventually making the target into a ghost herself. The telltale sign that someone will die? They receive a friend request from the ghost. In one of the movie’s more ridiculous moments, a hacker attempts to delete the haunted Facebook profile, only to find that it was coded in runes.

The vilification of a scorned woman is a common trope in horror, and every time I encounter it, I want to scream. Don’t you see the world will always be more frightening for us than it is frightened of us? Don’t you see that this, the ghost of a wronged woman, is not the fear behind our screens?

We die differently now that we have each other at the tip of our fingertips. We live differently, too.

This isn’t to say that there is no such thing as a good social media horror movie. A notable exception is with Cam, which follows an ambitious camgirl after her account is hacked by a mysterious clone. The clone, made entirely through automated software, mimics the main character so perfectly that she not only keeps her fanbase, she grows it. Later, we find that the roving piece of malware has targeted multiple cam girls, even dead cam girls, stripping them not of their image, but of their source of income. Cam is a bold, empathetic look at sex work in the age of social media, but even this movie left me with a sour taste in my mouth.

Ultimately, the malignant bot is defeated only by a simple sleight of hand: The protagonist “tricks” the machine into handing her the password to the account. This would never happen in real life. Ghosts and men do not hand over their passwords.

I watch horror to gain a deeper understanding of my own fears. But what’s more frightening, a ghost who can code in runes (Friend Request) or the realities of Canada border patrol agents using ancestry.com to find undocumented immigrants? And then there’s surveillance state, for that matter, the ubiquity of cameras, the mass cache of data that the government and private companies own, the facts of our lives that are hidden even to ourselves. Maybe social media horror movies often steer into the area of the goofy and ridiculous, laptop screens and coded runes, because a truly realistic rendering of social media at its most powerful would leave the protagonists with no sense of escape at all.

I have made and deleted profiles on camgirl sites. When money has been tight, I have made and deleted profiles on sites that promise, through veiled language, a financial and sexual “arrangement.” My friends talk about these sites in hushed whispers, reassuring each other that there’s nothing wrong, we have bills, and what if something happens, don’t we deserve a safety net? I did not delete these sites because of my own shame of sex work, though that has taken a long time to undo. I deleted them because the internet seems haunted by the wills of terrible men, and I do not know what they could do to me if they wanted to.

The sudden advent of a strange DM on my Twitter account gives me the same feeling as a sudden sound in a house where I know that I am alone. But at home, I can pull back the shower curtain, laugh at myself. I can google “signs that your house is haunted,” and, again, laugh at myself. And yes, I can put tape over my webcam. But that stranger, once his DM is deleted, can come back again and again—new accounts, different faces, email, Instagram, Twitter.

Unfriended and Friend Request want me to be afraid of the ghosts online, the ghosts of women, specifically. And I do not doubt that, if there are ghosts, they would likely find a home in the vast anonymity of the internet, in one of the many machines that can think. But these warped ghosts do not frighten me as much as they should. I am more afraid of the anonymity that certain people find within the machine, at the nation-state’s widening eye. For better or for worse, I keep the tape over my webcam. If anyone were to watch, I would be nothing but a smudge, a shadow, the outline of a girl with no face or name.

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